5 Creepy Abandoned Rooms Found Hiding in Plain Sight

#2. A Collapsed World War I Bunker

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When you hear "trench warfare," you picture either soldiers lying down face first in muddy ditches or khaki coats doing battle, but it's probably that first one. So when we talk about somebody accidentally stumbling across an old trench full of dead bodies from World War I, you'd probably just picture a bunch of bones in a ditch. But a lot of these trenches were actually the equivalent of tiny unfinished basements, which makes it that much weirder that one could go completely undiscovered for 90 years.

Yet in 2010, French engineers looking to build a road discovered a German trench from 1918. In addition to housing the remains of 21 German soldiers who were killed by French shells, archaeologists discovered walls, floors, and a system for heating. At almost 400 feet long, the trench was more of a dirt hotel than a last-second hole in the ground. These guys had electricity and phone lines back when the rest of the world was still using telegrams and smoke signals. Oh, and beds. These guys had beds.

Workers also found a wine bottle, a mustard bottle, wallets, glasses, and rosary beads. They also found a French shell threaded on a rosary chain -- a macabre souvenir of life in the bunker. They also found the remains of a goat, which was most likely used for fresh milk underground. We hope.

Now, if these were French soldiers or American soldiers or, hell, Samoans, everyone would be clamoring for DNA testing to claim their long-lost granddad Malietoa. Not Germans. After 70 years of stuffing any nationalistic pride they had left into their delicious sausages, there was no way anyone was going to want to resurrect the bones of wars past.

Via Spiegel.de"You start one-and-a-half world wars and no one ever lets you forget it."

#1. A Cold War Bomb Shelter Found in a High School

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One day at a high school in Auburn, California, somebody wondered what was behind the tiny little locked screen door in the weight room that nobody ever, ever used:

Back when the USSR and USA were in the middle of their nuclear staring contest, the civil defense department of the government sanctioned and funded bomb shelters all over the country. And officials at this high school went all-out for theirs -- they stocked the secret room with water, medicine, food, toilet paper, and LOTS of bottles of diarrhea medicine. Nuclear war was a huge diarrhea instigator, apparently.

Before the world was drinking bottled water, bomb shelter preppers were bagging water for doomsday. These bags of water are as clear as a summer sky. You could drink them now, if you wanted. And the decades-old food was likely more nutritious than whatever was being served in the cafeteria.